Author's Description:

LB Quick Visual Designer is a free GUI/form designer for Liberty Basic. It was created to simplify making forms while providing a professional looking environment. Version 1.0 boasts a number of features:

• You can actually select each control on the control palette and draw it with your mouse on the form grid, then move or resize as you wish
• Realistic form and controls, not graphical representations
• Intuitive menu and popup menu editors allow for quick menu creation and you can see a realistic menu bar on the form
• Properties for form and controls can be set inside properties editor as you would expect of a pro form designer
• Form or control changes are applied instantly: for instance button caption is changed as you type in a new caption or graphicbox back ground color is applied as soon as you pick the right color out of its color list
• See the results immediately: click a button to show the form inside QVD as it would actually look, without importing and compiling the code with LB editor
• Copy generated code to Win clipboard, load inside LB editor or NotePad, each with a single button
• Snap controls to grid or lock all controls to prevent accidentally moving them
• Save code in standard .bas file, ready to open inside LB editor, reopen .qvd file inside QVD for any adjustments to your visual design
• plus many more...

Review

note: this review was written for version 1.0 of QVD, which was downloaded on March 17, 2004. The program may have been updated since this review was written.

QVD includes a control palette and a properties window at its left side. It also includes a toolbar at the top. The majority of the window space is available for designing GUIs. Here is a screenshot of QVD in action:

The controls are actual controls rather than graphic representations of controls, so they match the current desktop color scheme and style, like the Maple color scheme shown in the screenshot. The GUI menu is a graphic representation and not an actual menu, and it appears in gray rather than in the default color, as do some of the toolbar buttons.

Clicking the "Help" button on the toolbar generates a Windows error message that the file cannot be found. The path appears to be hard coded to "F:\...". Browse to the installed location of QVD on your computer and select the "HELP.HLP" file so that Windows can find the helpfile when you click the "Help" button in the future.

You can add a control to the form easily by clicking the button on the control palette that represents the desired control. Your cursor becomes a crosshair and you must click on the GUI to set the location of the control, and drag the mouse to create it in the size desired. Release the mouse when the control is to your liking. After a control is created, it can be modified by clicking on it again with the mouse. The properties window then contains the properties for that control. You can make changes as desired in the properties window. You can also move or size the control by clicking and dragging the control itself or one of the eight sizing handles. The location and size textboxes in the properties window are readonly, so changes in size and location must be made by clicking and dragging the control or its sizing handles with the mouse.

The properties window also allows you to set the properties for the window, as well as for the controls. These properties include colors, captions and font. You may select a font for the window, but not for individual controls. The FONT command in the code generated by QVD is in error. It neglects to include underscore characters where spaces appear in the font name and it also neglects to include a size designation.

The GUI designer has a grid for control placement, and an option that causes controls to snap to the grid as they are moved and sized. You can also lock the controls in place so that they cannot be moved accidentally.

There are menu editors for regular and popup menus. To use them, you must type the caption desired in the textbox at the top of the menu editor, then press a button to insert either a menu or menu item. This was a little confusing at first, because the API refers to top level menus as "Sub Menus" and the items in the menu list are called "Menu Items." QVD calls the top level menus "Menu Items" and the items in the list are called "Sub Menus." This is the opposite of the usual terminology. The menu captions can be moved up or down as desired. Menus or items are inserted at the location that is currently highlighted. Branch labels are generated in the code automatically, based on the menu caption. There appears to be no way to set branch label names in the menu editor.

There are a number of options for code generation. Code for the current GUI can be loaded into the Liberty BASIC editor. It can also be copied to the clipboard. It can even be opened in Notepad for viewing. The code can be "run" from within QVD so that you can view it as it would appear in your application. This feature does not open a new window, but rather renders the GUI designer window as it would appear in a completed application, without grid markings and sizing handles.

GUI forms can be saved and loaded into QVD. When you choose to save a form, you are prompted for a filename with a BAS extension. The file is saved as BASIC source code and the form is saved with the qvd extension so that it can again be loaded into QVD. There is no option to save as one or the other. Files are always saved in both formats.